THE WORLD

THE WORLD; Mao and Deng: Competition for History's Judgment

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Published: November 15, 1987

SINCE the West first encroached on China in the Opium War of 1840, awakening the Chinese to their backwardness, Chinese patriots have searched for the elusive secret of modernization. Many tried, and failed, leaving China only farther behind. But in the view of an increasing number of Western specialists, one leader has finally succeeded: Deng Xiaoping.

Mr. Deng's triumphant orchestration of the 13th Chinese Communist Party Congress earlier this month only confirmed the widely held view that it is he, rather than Mao Zedong, who may prove to be the more significant historical figure.

At a conference at Brown University last week to evaluate the changes Mr. Deng has implemented since gaining ascendancy in 1979, most of the scholars agreed on this point.

''Mao was one of the great unifiers, but in the end he was a disaster,'' said A. Doak Barnett, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. ''Deng will have the longer lasting impact, and he's doing it through peaceful means.''

Mao and Mr. Deng joined the fledgling Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920's in a historical accident. Both were searching for a way to end China's weakness, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 seemed the best answer from the West.

Social revolution became the means to their end of reviving China, suggested Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of government at Harvard University. But during the last two decades of Mao's life, in the Great Leap Forward of 1958, in which 25 million to 30 million people died of starvation, and then in the Cultural Revolution, the chairman made an end of his means as he sought instant utopia.

The disaster of those years eventually freed Mr. Deng from Communist orthodoxy and allowed him to begin moving China away from its Soviet-style, centrally planned economy. As Mr. Deng looks outward today, the appealing new model is China's rapidly growing Asian neighbors - Japan, Taiwan and South Korea - that have combined economic entrepreneurship with tight political control.

Under Mr. Deng's tutelage, the Communists have abolished Mao's cherished rural communes, returning to private family farming, and the economy has grown 8 percent a year, six times the recent average rate in Eastern Europe.

He has reversed Mao's policy of national self-reliance, opening China to the world so rapidly that its foreign trade has quintupled in the last eight years. This has given Beijing hard-currency earnings that surpass those of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries combined.

Mr. Deng's retirement from the Central Committee at age 83 was also regarded by the scholars at the conference as a brilliant coup, helping to force many of his elderly conservative opponents to step down, too. As Hong Yung Lee, a professor of political science at Yale, noted, Mr. Deng has succeeded in reducing the average age of the members of the Central Committee by 14 years.

Half the members of the country's governing body now have college educations and 40 percent have engineering degrees. Until a few years ago, almost all of China's senior leaders were elderly men from peasant backgrounds with little or no education. Ominous Signs

Yet as Mr. Deng has moved to give China what he calls ''socialism with Chinese characteristics,'' there are signs that some of his changes are not working as well as he would like. At the Brown conference, the specialists discussed problems in the following areas:

* Education. Mr. Deng has given priority to turning out a small number of good scientists and engineers, reversing Mao's egalitarian goal of mass education. Mao's system produced a large number of students, but, Chinese authorities say today, significant numbers of them received a second-rate education.

In fact, the number of high school graduates dropped from 7.2 million in 1979 to 1.96 million in 1985, said Suzanne Pepper, a senior associate of the Universities Field Staff International, a New Hampshire-based research organization. In the same period, the number of high schools declined from 192,152 to 93,221. In part, the change marks a return to the more traditional, elitist Chinese approach to education.

It also reflects the changes brought by the new family farming system. Farmers find they can make more money by keeping their children in the fields rather than letting them go to school.

The 1982 census found that 236 million of the country's one billion people were illiterate or semi-literate. Despite the magnitude of the problem, China ranks 132d out of 149 nations in spending per capita for education, according to a Unesco study, using only about 10 percent of the Government's budget for schooling.

* Population control. China's effort to limit families to one child is not working as well as Beijing had earlier claimed. In a speech to the conference, Li Luye, China's envoy to the United Nations, acknowledged that by the middle of the next century China's population is expected to reach 1.4 to 1.5 billion, 200 to 300 million above the Government's target.